With prices rising and the credit crunch biting, consumers are taking more time to find the best deals online. Last week we contributed to an Experian Footfall report which highlighted the downturn on the high street and in out of town shopping centres, compared with the increase in online retail traffic. Although the high fuel prices are clearly contributing to this trend, the major benefit that internet shopping has over bricks and mortar is the ease of browsing multiple outlets to find the cheapest price. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds: Rewards and Directories category – which consists primarily of price comparison engines, affiliates and voucher sites – has increased by 37% over the last 12 months.

Rewards and Directories sites sent over half of their downstream traffic to other retailers in June. As the table below illustrates, the biggest beneficiaries were sites within our Department Stores and Appliances and Electronics retail sub-sectors. Over the last three months the category has received traffic from 929,000 distinct search terms, illustrating the variety of goods included within their systems. Aside from the most popular price comparison brands and retailer names (e.g. ‘ebay’, ‘tesco’, ‘argos’), the top product searches refer to gadgets, with ‘wii fit’, ‘wii fit in stock’ and ‘mobile phone reviews’ currently the most popular. A clear growth area is fashion: the amount of traffic the category sends to Apparel and Accessories retailers has increased by 60% over the last year, and ‘primark’ is now the second most popular retail brand name sending the category traffic.

One of the interesting data points in the table above is the amount of traffic that Rewards and Directories sites send to their competitors: 13.4%. This implies that UK consumers are not only using price comparison sites to check prices, but actually browsing multiple price comparison sites for the find the best deal. And they seem to stick what they know: the table below contains the top 10 Rewards and Directory sites in June, a list that hasn’t changed much during the last few months of market growth.